Stuffing sausages with meat emulsion normally involves pumping meat emulsion through a hollow tube or sleeve towards a discharge end of the sleeve. A hollow tubular casing material is slidably mounted on the outside of the sleeve with an otherwise open end extending just beyond the discharge end of the sleeve. The open end of the casing is then closed in any convenient manner. The meat emulsion extruded out of the sleeve enters the casing which becomes filled with the pressure on the pumped meat emulsion slidably moving the casing off of the sleeve. The filled casing is then formed into links through conventional means. This process works well with artificial casings which can be shirred or telescopically compressed so that a casing thirty feet or so in length can be compressed into a shirred condition of slightly more than a foot in length, thus allowing many sausages to be made before a new shirred casing is placed on the sleeve.
However, in the case of natural casings comprised of the intestines of certain animals, the sausage making process is substantially slowed because the natural casings vary in length and are substantially shorter than artificial casings. As a result, the natural casings have to be replaced at a high frequency, thus creating substantial down time for the machine.
It is therefore a principal object of this invention to provide a method and means for stuffing natural casings with sausage emulsion which will greatly accelerate the stuffing of natural casings by preloading the casings on a quickly positioned auxiliary sleeve so that the natural casing on the preloaded sleeve can be instantly placed on the primary stuffing tube without manually inserting the natural casing over the end of the stuffing tube.
A further object of this invention is to provide a convenient arrangement for retaining the sleeve to the stuffing tube as the sleeve is placed on the tube.
A still further object of this invention is to provide a convenient arrangement for the sleeve to be automatically removed from the stuffing tube after the natural casing has been filled with meat emulsion upon leaving the outer surface of the sleeve.
These and other objects will be apparent to those skilled in the art.